


Thin Lines

by blithers



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Gen, Hostage Situations, Journalism, POV Outsider
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-22
Updated: 2013-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-05 13:57:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1094708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blithers/pseuds/blithers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The story of Starling City and the eldest son of the Queen family are tied together, in strange, often illogical ways.  Oliver Queen is a next-generation one percenter, one of the coterie of overbred socialites that find their calling in reality television, branded perfumes, and over-priced clothing lines.  Mr. Queen owns and operates a nightclub in Starling City called Verdant.</p><p>On October 15th, 2013, that nightclub was the scene of an attack on the Queen family.</p><p>What happened that night is still unclear.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Thin Lines

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Tassos](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tassos/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, Tassos! And thank you to my beta readers, [htbthomas](http://htbthomas.tumblr.com/), [ghostcat](http://ghostcat3000.tumblr.com/), and C. Spoilers through the first episode of season two.

When Oliver Queen dreams, he dreams of dirt and rain and blood.

He exists. He persists. He can only distantly remember a different time, paparazzi on the street and the hipbone of a woman under his hand, flipping off the camera and laughing until he runs out of oxygen. The only thing that's real is the mud and rain, stinging his eyes and blurring his vision. And the island.

The island is always real.

\---

_"Starling City's Vigilante" by Daniel Sasaki  
New York Times, January 2014_

_The Queen family, in Starling City, are modern-day royalty. They are job creators and destroyers, and the cultural ancestor of names like Astor, Rockefeller, and Vanderbilt. Queen Consolidated has expanded in recent years to holdings in Brazil, India, Russia, and China, but the heart of the company remains entrenched in the factories of Starling City, where they remain part of America's industrial landscape._

_The story of Starling City and the eldest son of the Queen family are tied together, in strange, often illogical ways. Oliver Queen is a next-generation one percenter, one of the coterie of overbred socialites that find their calling in reality television, branded perfumes, and over-priced clothing lines. Mr. Queen owns and operates a nightclub in Starling City called Verdant._

_On October 15th, 2013, that nightclub was the scene of an attack on the Queen family._

_What happened that night is still unclear._

\---

Oliver wakes up.

It takes him a minute to figure out what, exactly, woke him, because there's nothing obviously wrong.

The office door is locked. The bass of the music in the club is pounding rhythmically, loudly, vibrating upward through the floor with the steady smack of compressed air and the fainter thrum of distorted dubstep over top. Oliver is alone in the room. He's stretched out on the couch Thea had added to his spartan office when she took over the club during the summer.

Everything seems normal.

Until, with a strange, slippery shift of reality, it… _doesn't_.

Because Oliver realizes suddenly what he can't hear, but what he _should_ hear - the distant hum of the drunk, pretty things that pack the club, yelling at each other over the echoing music and general din, filling the converted warehouse with their loud, gratingly unaware humanity. Instead, in their place, there's an eerie silence, sandwiched between the too-loud bass and the distorted lyrics of a song nobody is supposed to pay attention to, anyway.

Oliver rolls to his feet. He moves too smoothly, body tensed for attack. He can feel the thump of the bass, feet pressed up against the ground, the floor shaking like a shivering echo of the man-made earthquake.

He presses his ear up against the door. Nothing except music. Then - _there_. A stutter of damning silence, a moment of stillness between songs, the earth going solid and wrong underneath his feet. And that’s how Oliver knows.

He doesn't have his cell phone on him, so he tries the one on the desk. Tommy had laughed at him for installing a landline, had called him an old man for weeks.

There's no dial tone.

He's not sure where Thea or Roy is tonight, if they’re working or not. He’s not sure where Diggle or Felicity are.

Oliver pats blindly underneath the desk drawers. He finds the matched pair of throwing knives stuck to the bottom of the drawers with duct tape where he hid them, from before, but the handgun behind the bookshelf is long gone - Felicity had surreptitiously smuggled it out when Thea had first moved in. He catalogues the rest of his limited assets. The curled cord from the phone, wrapped around his wrist. A dull silver letter opener and a book of matches from Starling City Casino. A pen, tucked into his front shirt pocket.

He tapes the knives, his best resource, along the side of his body with the duct tape. He leaves his shirt untucked and slips the top button of his collar, pulling the fabric away from his throat like a business man coming home from a long day's work.

There's a bottle of whiskey hidden behind the statue of some half-naked greek god or the other that Thea said was _super classy, Ollie, tooootally mom-approved_. Oliver takes a shot from the bottle and swishes it. He splashes some of the remaining alcohol from the bottle on his neck and wrist.

Oliver lowers his shoulders, plasters a club owner's smile on his face, and pads out of the office, showing bare skin at his wrists and reeking of whiskey.

\---

_You know the name Oliver Queen, of course. He made national news last year with a life more reminiscent of a summer blockbuster than that of a bar owner. Lost at sea in 2007. Discovered on a deserted island five years later, in the fall of 2012. A month after that he was arrested on suspicion of being the Starling City vigilante, though those charges were later dropped. Then, in the spring of 2013, Mr. Queen's mother confessed to an intricate, almost unbelievable conspiracy to decimate Starling City’s Glades district, which houses most of the city's poor._

_We don't know much about the time Mr. Queen spent as a real-life castaway. It's a five year gap in the public record, one known only in outline. Queen's sole public statement on that time is the one he gave at the deposition that overturned his legal standing as deceased. "My father didn't make it. […] I knew that I was going to have to live for both of us. And in those five years, it was that one thought that kept me going."_

_Mr. Queen has never spoken about his time on the island with the media._

\---

Oliver presses his back up against the wall and palms the bulge of knives taped underneath his shirt. The emptiness of the club is obvious now, the music ricocheting off the exposed steel in the rafters, rattling around the bones of the building like a rib cage. He can't see anything from this angle.

He closes his eyes, breathes into himself, and _listens_.

He hears it then: a gasp, a soft noise of pleading that doesn't make it any further than somebody's throat. The chorus kicks up again, triumphantly exhorting an empty crowd to put their hands in the air, and the quiet noise disappears, smothered beneath an electronic wall of sirens and bass.

The duct tape takes hair and skin with it as he peels it back to get at the first of the knives. The blade slides against his torso like a paper cut as he works it loose. The scratch is nail-thin and pulses hot. He feels naked without a hood to pull up around him, his face bared to the world. He presses the duct tape back down, trapping the second knife back against his body, and shifts the freed blade to his left hand.

 _Loosen your grip, boy_ , Slade whispers in his ear.

His grip corrects itself automatically, firm and loose, the power coming from his shoulder.

He comes around the corner inch by careful inch. The darkness of the hallway falls away to reveal a staged scene: a spotlight, creating a circle of garish, too-bright light. A wooden chair. A woman, tied to the chair, facing away from him with her hands bound behind her back.

_Thea._

Oliver freezes. Thea's hair is down in curls around her shoulders. He can't tell if she's gagged, or worse. Her head is tilted downward, chin tucked in toward her chest. Her shoulders are dropped low - a gesture of defeat or unconsciousness, he can't tell. 

He can't see anybody else, just Thea, tied to a straight-backed chair, the spotlight like a crown above her head. There's no movement in the rafters and steel girders. He hasn't moved from the relative safety of the hallway yet. He doesn't know how long he has.

He enters the open area cautiously, knife held out in front of him, in a half-crouch. The music is deafening.

Then Oliver sees him.

There's a man standing behind the bar, looking curiously at the shelves of alcohol, curved glass and the backlit whiskey-golden glow. He'd been hidden from view in the hallway. He has short-cropped white hair, ears like a teapot, and a broad-shouldered straightness that reminds Oliver of Diggle, a stick up his ass and the discipline to back it up. The bar is littered with half-empty martini glasses and crumpled cocktail napkins.

Oliver hears something behind him then, faint, under the music, from above the door to the hallway. He ducks low and pivots on his heel, but there's a loud noise and a sharp pain blossoms in the back of the calf of his stationary leg. He stumbles at the jolt of electric pain. At first it's just a strange, dull sensation of something _wrong_ , but it transitions fast as the severed muscle and tendons scream in protest.

Shot. He's been shot in his calf muscle.

His leg collapses. Oliver bites down hard on the noise that threatens to claw its way up out of him.

"Mr. Queen." The man behind the bar turns around, sounding not unpleased. He sets down the bottle of liquor he'd been inspecting. "How kind of you to join us."

Something heavy and hard crashes into the back of Oliver's head, like a freight train ramming into his ears, and the rest is darkness.

\---

"Ollie?"

There's a muted roar of sound, and the dim awareness of light and shadow. His tongue feels swollen, a strange, fuzzy thing that has taken up residence in his mouth. He swallows. The motion feels revelatory.

"…Oliver?" The voice is a whisper, wavering unsteadily. "Are you okay?"

Oliver lifts his head, but his eyes aren't focusing. There's a throb of pain in his left calf, pulsing distantly like a white star, collapsing in upon itself with the roar of atoms being torn apart and elements burning away into the stuff of the universe.

It seems reasonable to say he's not doing well.

He tries to form the words, but it comes out as a gargled moan. It takes Oliver a second minute to process that. Head injury. Whatever is going on with his leg he can deal with - pain is something he can control, can harness and understand, but concussions are nasty, and a whole different sort of beast.

He doesn't have time for this right now.

"Ollie?"

It's Thea's voice. Which means she's alive. And conscious.

"Yeah." The word feels strange in his mouth, his tongue forming unfamiliar shapes. "I'm okay. Are you okay?"

There's a weird silence after his question, and then Thea repeats, "Oliver?"

"I'm here," he says. His vision is blurry, colors pooling into thing-shaped smudges of neon blue and steel and black. Thea - the person he thinks is Thea, where her voice is coming from - is a pale blob next to him. He realizes then that he's strapped to a chair like Thea was, hands behind his back, cord biting into his wrist. The club music is gone now, turned off. The club drips an eerie silence.

Oliver tries to rub his palms together. The knot holds tight.

He shifts to feel if the knife is still duct taped to his body, but there’s nothing. His pockets are empty, but when he rubs his arm against the side of his body he does feel the roll of the phone cord, like a lifeline. He wonders where the knives are. He wonders what Thea thought when she saw them take the knives off him, taped to his body like a frat-boy parody of Die Hard.

Another silence. "Oliver, I don't understand what you're saying," Thea says softly, panic in her voice.

"Shut up," a voice barks. "This isn't the Queen family social hour."

Oliver waits for the familiar bite of Thea's voice, the girl who always talks back, what their mother used to call the sass monster that lived under Thea's bed. But Thea falls silent, and Oliver can't see well enough to tell if she's cowed or scared or simply being smart. He tries to move his hands again. The knot at the back of his wrist pulls slightly to the left.

\---

_During the five years that Mr. Queen was gone, Starling City declined. Detroit may have beaten Starling City to the punch in declaring bankruptcy, but Starling City has garnered national focus as a hotbed of organized crime, white-collar corruption, and a string of violent, brutal murders. It is a city of exorbitant wealth and crippling poverty; a modern-day gangland Chicago._

_Mr. Queen's nightclub Verdant straddles both worlds. Verdant is a club for Starling City's glitterati and idle rich in a district inching toward gentrification. It is housed in an abandoned Queen Consolidated factory, which had been closed seven years ago when the work was outsourced to China. The building sat abandoned and rusting until Oliver Queen's return. The renovations took several months before opening its doors earlier this year._

\---

Oliver's vision gradually improves, dizzy nausea crowding his thoughts, born of blood loss and blunt force trauma. A bar towel is wrapped around the lower half of his leg, acting as a tourniquet, laundry-white where it's not soaked in the rust of his blood. His ankles are tied to the chair. Blood drips into his leather shoes.

The Thea-shaped blob next to him slowly resolves into his baby sister, scraped red on her cheek and a nasty looking bruise starting to bloom under her left eye. The eyelid is grotesquely puffy and half-closed.

He catches her eyes, and tries to reassure her without words.

_Everything is okay. Everything will be okay. I will always take care of you._

He sees her swallow and nod, barely, at him.

\---

_Oliver Queen's younger sister, Thea Queen, is the night manager at Verdant. At age 18 she cannot legally drink the alcohol she serves, has never attended a single college class, and has racked up a string of wild-child arrests in the past two years, including possession and driving under the influence. Ms. Queen is also surprisingly articulate and put-together for her age, a product of public life and media scrutiny since before she was born. She was closing at Verdant the night of October 15th when three men arrived at the main entrance at 2:13 AM._

_"They said they were from SC G &E [Starling City Gas & Electric] and had received a call about a potential gas leak on the property, so I unlocked the door. And that's when the one in front - his name was Matthew Blayden - hit me. And they tied me to a chair and just… left me there. Like bait."_

\---

Oliver works at the bindings around his wrist when he can risk it. Dislocating one of his thumbs would do the trick, but there's enough play in the knot that he might be able to get himself free without putting a hand out of commission. He licks gummy, dry lips, and ends up distracted by the feeling of his tongue sliding against his teeth.

There's the click of a lock. The door behind the bar opens, only a couple feet away from the man there, who grabs a gun from the back of his belt.

"Hey, Oliver, I was just looking at these reports, and -"

Felicity freezes, looking up for the first time, and immediately drops the papers she's holding and throws her hands up in the air.

"Who are you?"

"Nobody. Well, I mean, obviously, I'm _somebody_. Just… nobody that can… I'm Oliver's secretary. I mean, Mr. Queen, not… Oliver. His executive assistant. That's the…" She draws a deep breath, and Oliver can see the moment she weighs the lie and realizes it won't buy anything. "…My name is Felicity."

"Well, Felicity. If you keep your hands in the air, and walk slowly toward me, I might not even shoot you. Isn't that a deal?"

"Totally," Felicity says faintly. She walks carefully away from the door to the basement, hands still in the air.

There are no more chairs, so the bigger goon who isn't playing sniper has Felicity kick off her shoes and kneel on the ground, hands behind her back. He hogties her wrists and ankles together with a strange flourish at the end, like the whole fiasco is a rodeo and Felicity just won him the grand prize. It's a position that Oliver could work himself free from, but he's not sure if Felicity knows how.

Felicity looks over at him for the first time. Her eyes widen, flickering down to his leg. "Oliver, oh my God -"

"I'm fine," he says, interrupting her, speaking low and fast and as calm as he can. "It's okay. I've had worse."

Felicity stares at him, like Thea had, struck dumb. Like the idea of being shot not being the end of the world is so strange she can't comprehend it, can't wrap her head around it. Oliver feels an woozy, impatient stab of annoyance. He knows it's unfair.

Then Felicity says, carefully, like she's speaking to a child, "Oliver, you're speaking Chinese."

\---

_Oliver Queen was the second hostage._

_"It was over before I even knew what was happening." Mr. Queen shrugs. "I was coming out of the office when a man I didn't see shot me in the leg and knocked me out, and that was about it for me. Really, I'm just lucky I didn't die."_

\---

"I'm not…" Oliver starts to say, then stops. He tries to _listen_ to himself, to feel the shape of the words in his mouth. He shakes his head, like it's a vending machine and a brisk kick will loosen the right words, tumbling down from where they're snagged on metal spirals.

Thea's non-blacked eye widens. "Why is Oliver speaking Chinese?"

The concussion. It must be worse than he thought. 

"…Also, why does Oliver know _Chinese_?"

"Oliver. _Oliver_. Can you understand me?" Felicity stares at him intently, like she can will his native language back to life through sheer force of personality.

“Shut up,” the taller henchman snaps.

Oliver starts to respond, thinks better of it, and nods.

Felicity hesitates. Then she winks at him, quickly but deliberately. Oliver feels a rush of relief flood him, dulling the pain and dizzying him for an incapacitating second. Diggle. It has to be. Diggle knows.

“Hey, so," Felicity says, turning her head toward the man at the bar, "what's the deal with all this, anyway? I mean, the weird kidnapping thing we've got going on. 'Cause you've already got two people worth one hell of a lot of dough here. Is this, like, a hostage thing, or…"

"I said, _stop talking_.” The goon backhands Felicity across the face.

Oliver bares his teeth and jerks at the bindings around his wrists. The ropes lashing his ankles to the chair hold tight, but the cord around his wrist slips down his palm a couple inches. Thea looks like she’s biting back the urge to be sick. Her complexion is pale, her head held up too straight, with a blank expression and perfect posture: all the little tricks the two of them learned from their mother.

The man behind the bar looks up. He examines Felicity for the first time, like a schoolboy noticing a particularly interesting bug captured in a jar. "Hostages," he says finally, and if Oliver had been holding a cocktail glass this would have been the moment to drop it in comical surprise.

Felicity swallows, working around the fear plainly visible on her face now. "No offense, uh, sir, but you're starting to run short on the people who are going to pay to let us go.”

The man comes out from around the bar for the first time. He stands in front of Felicity in jeans and a t-shirt, the fabric clinging to his shoulders. Felicity looks up at him, on her knees. Oliver tenses, using the roaring throb of pain from his leg to make himself alert, to keep himself on the edge. The cord slips another half inch down his palm.

The man removes Felicity's glasses and drops them on the ground a couple feet away. He pats Felicity on the cheek.

"We're waiting for the Hood to save you, sweetheart." He glances back at the other man. "Gag them."

\---

_Felicity Smoak is Oliver Queen's executive assistant, and the third person taken hostage that night. She has a degree in computer science from MIT, where she was a national finalist on a team of three for the ACM International Collegiate Programming competition. She worked in Queen Consolidated's IT department for several years before making the unlikely lateral move to serve as Mr. Queen's personal secretary._

_Ms. Smoak adjusts her glasses, square and trendy, before speaking._

_"I was working late, you know, finishing up some paperwork. When I came out into the club I saw Thea and Mr. Queen, both tied to chairs. And Oliver was… he'd been shot in the leg. All I knew at that point was that he'd lost a lot of blood."_

\---

The Hood. They're waiting for the Hood.

Felicity's eyes fly over to him. She does everything except gasp dramatically and point an accusing finger at him, but, amazingly, nobody seems to notice. The man in charge heads back to the bar, kicking Felicity's glasses further out of the way. The henchman pulls a couple strips of cloth out of a worn duffle bag and efficiently gags them in order of demonstrated chattiness (Felicity, Thea, Oliver). The fabric presses down unpleasantly on Oliver's swollen tongue, like a finger pressing against an unpopped zit. The gag tastes like sweat and stale cotton in his too-dry mouth. He tries not to vomit.

Somehow, they don't know it's him.

They built a trap for the Hood and baited it with a crippled Oliver Queen.

Oliver can feel an unhinged sort of laughter bubbling unpleasantly inside of him, his brain slow with blood loss. He flexes his jaw, feeling the pull of the cloth knot behind his neck. Thea gives him a strange look, the same sort of intense eye contact Felicity was working when she dropped the whole speaking-in-the-wrong-language bomb. Oliver reigns it in as best he can.

\---

_To understand what happened next, you need to know about the Starling City vigilante._

\---

There's a crash and a scream of pain from the ceiling, and a man falls from the sky, a green-fletched arrow sticking out of his chest.

\---

_The police description for the Hood describes him as male, six foot tall, unknown hair and eye color, with an athletic build and a trimmed goatee. He wears dark green, leather pants, and the eponymous hood, which hides his features. He carries a modified recurve bow. He is, depending on who you ask: a criminal, a serial murder, a hero._

_The Hood was born out of the Occupy protests which rocked Starling City last year, a particularly volatile reflection of the nationwide demonstrations. Six months later, the Hood started his Robin Hood-style career as a white collar crime crusader, targeting businessmen guilty of malpractice, embezzlement, fraud, and price-fixing. And he did all of this, not at gun point, but (taking the Robin Hood comparison to its natural conclusion) at arrow point._

\---

The body hits the ground with the dull, sickly slap of flesh against concrete. It lands a couple feet away from Thea, who yelps, the sound strangled and eerie, distorted by the thick strap of fabric through her mouth. Oliver looks up at the ceiling, at the exposed beams, at the vents. Nothing.

"Check him," the man behind the bar snaps, attention fully engaged for the first time.

The henchman has his gun up, trained high. He works his way over to the body sprawled out on the ground, and Oliver reads military training in every line of the man, how he positions himself against an unknown enemy. He keeps his gun up as he crouches to put two fingers to the side of the sniper's neck. The man's body is twisted like a poorly-scrawled question mark on the floor.

"Dead."

Felicity makes a soft noise in the back of her throat and looks over at him again. Her eyes are wide, and Oliver realizes, with a jolt of displaced strangeness, piled on top of everything else, that he doesn't know how bad Felicity's vision is without her glasses.

"Let them go," a voice booms from above them; Diggle's voice, distorted and lowered electronically.

Oliver catches a glimpse of the tip of an arrow glinting in the shadows where the catwalk runs across the ceiling for the main spotlights. Diggle has the leathers on, dark green hood pulled up around his face. He cuts an imposing figure as the Arrow; broader across the shoulders and torso than Oliver, with a brawler's stance, rocked back on his heels.

The man circles the bar, dragging a coy finger along the edge. "Come out where I can see you."

"Nah," Diggle says. "I like it just fine up here."

"But I've been waiting for you. You -" the man gestures, "- after all, are the reason we're having this little party."

"No offense, man, but you throw a shitty party."

The man pauses. "Do you know who I am?"

"No. Why, am I supposed to keep track of every two-bit criminal in this town?"

"I suppose it is too much to expect you to remember the destruction you leave in your wake."

Diggle doesn't say anything for a moment before repeating, "Let them _go_."

"Not until I get what I want."

"Oh yeah? And what's that?"

"Justice," the man says, flatly.

"Look, all I know is there is no justice happening here, right now. Let the women go, at least. And then we can talk."

"You know," the man says slowly, "I don't think you're him. The Arrow. You're not the same." Oliver's blood turns to slush in his veins, slow and cold. He can hear the drumming of his pulse in his ears. 

"Oh yeah? Arrow this, then," Diggle says.

\---

_Here is what everybody present the night of October 15th agrees: The Starling City vigilante saved three people. He also killed one. If saving two billionaires (and their highly educated executive assistant) doesn't follow the Hood's normal class warrior M.O., there is at least precedent: in the spring, the Arrow was pivotal in saving Malcolm Merlyn, a local billionaire, from an attempt on his life at a charity gala._

_Here is what the people who were present that night do not agree on: whether the real Hood was actually there. And how many people acting as the Hood there were._

\---

Diggle shots a second arrow at the ground behind the chair where Oliver is tied up.

Oliver tips himself backwards, grabbing for the arrow as he falls, and makes contact just as the palm of his hand slides into the arrowhead. The impact of the chair with the ground drives his bound wrists backward into his body. His shoulders twist in their sockets. Oliver contorts his torso, flipping up onto his side enough to insert the tip of the arrow into the loosened knot behind his back and slice outward. He gets his hands free. Two seconds.

The enforcer takes a couple potshots at Diggle, too fast for accuracy.

Oliver uses the arrow to cut the ropes binding his ankles, working frantically.

He turns and starts to move toward Felicity, but his left leg gives out from under him. He stumbles and lands hard on his kneecap.

He slides the arrow across the floor instead, fletching first, at Felicity. He forces his feet back under him and launches himself at the back of the man shooting at Diggle, yanking the phone cord from his arm and wrapping it around the man's neck, pulling back with everything he has.

The henchman splutters. He claws at his neck, still holding the gun.

Then Oliver feels the prod of something metal and cold in the small of his back.

"Impressive, Ollie," the man behind him says. "But you're going to let him go now, aren't you?"

Oliver slides off the man's back slowly, keeping weight back on his right leg, and puts his hands in the air. He tries to turn on his one good leg and is forced to hop. His vision blurs. He sways on the leg like a dandelion in a stiff breeze.

He sees Felicity behind the man, free of the bindings. She's holding the arrow he slid her by the shaft, over her head like a cartoon villain, sneaking up on tip toes.

Felicity's eyes flicker upward, behind Oliver, and then she plunges the arrow into the man's upper back.

Diggle swings down from the metal walkway at the same time, gets his arms around Oliver's waist, and the momentum carries them both in the direction of the still-open door behind the bar that leads to the basement. They both stumble as they land. Oliver accidentally puts weight on his bad leg and half-screams. Felicity turns and runs in front of them as the man she'd stabbed lurches and claws at his back.

They run, Thea still tied up in the chair behind them.

"If you call the police," the man screams behind them at the empty hallway, "I will kill her."

\---

_Matthew Blayden, in his testimony at the trial where he was convicted of three counts of kidnapping and assault, alleged that their were three separate people acting at the Hood that night. Starling City has had its share of copycats - throw a dark green hoodie on and buy a bow and arrows from Walmart and anybody with a grudge is in business. However, Mr. Blayden's statement does not agree with the testimony of the three people who had been kidnapped, who all corroborated with each other's statements: that one man, the Hood, had saved them that night._

_Mr. Blayden declined to be interviewed for this article. When faced with the conflicting testimony in court, he could not offer an explanation. He did, however, state that he did not believe that the real Hood - if such a person exists - was in Verdant that night._

\---

"Jesus, Oliver," Diggle says, and pushes him back into Felicity's rolling chair. Oliver doesn't realize how weak he is until he topples over at Diggle's gentle shove. "Who was that?"

"I don't know." Oliver grits his teeth as Diggle examines the makeshift tourniquet around his calf. Diggle looks up at him, eyebrows raised.

"Oliver, you're speaking in…"

"Chinese," Felicity finishes, inspecting the gash along his palm through an old pair of glasses, round-framed and silver.

His tongue feels thick and heavy in his mouth. He closes his eyes. Thoughts slip away from him like the white flash of silvery fish, flitting here and there, sparks of light in the darkness. Oliver dreams in a rotating kaleidoscope of languages: Russian, Chinese, English, the island, the sand-paper grittiness of mud on his fingers and concrete under his knees, the screams of prisoners echoing in a metal box. He thinks of the way he wants to scratch his way out of his own head sometimes, to peel the persona of Oliver Queen off, this patchwork of half-remembered drunken socialite behavior and the hyper-manners of a civilized age that he wears like an itchy sweater.

He think of his mother, and Thea. He thinks of Felicity and Diggle and Laurel and Tommy.

Oliver opens his eyes.

"Concussion," he says, maneuvering his way drunkenly around the word. It feels _wrong_ , foreign, like forcing consonants through a mouthful of marbles. But Felicity's eyes widen and Diggle goes back to peeling the bar towel carefully off his calf, lips tight. The dried blood crackles and sheds as he loosens the bandaging.

"Can you walk on this thing?"

Oliver makes himself stand up. He tentatively shifts his weight from his right leg to the left, and blackness swarms his vision, a rush of blood like a waterfall in his ears.

"Down, boy," Diggle says, and pushes him back to seated again.

Oliver shakes his head. "How -?"

"I called him," Felicity says. "I thought there some something a little strange about the security feed from the club, so I called Dig before heading up."

Felicity calls their first aid kit the Med Tank, a heavy, wheeled unit that doubles as an ad hoc emergency room. Diggle cuts off the bottom half of Oliver's pants with the knife from his belt while Felicity pulls out a QuickClot packet and swaps the bar towel out for clean bandaging.

"John," Oliver says, thinking through the words he's going to say, practicing the language he is going to say them in, weaving the strands together with thick, clumsy fingers.

"What?"

"You killed him."

Diggle's mouth tightens, his eyes on his hands, inspecting the gauze around Oliver's leg. He doesn't respond immediately. "I'm not as good as you with a bow and arrow."

Oliver swallows, a taste of acrid dryness coating his throat.

Diggle stands and wipes his hands against his pants briskly. "Do we call the police?"

"Not yet."

"I thought you might say that. Are you able to Hood up? Because whoever that guy is, it appears he's met the real you before."

Felicity straightens up. "I actually had a thought about that."

\---

_Ms. Smoak calls what happened that night a miracle._

_"I'm not exactly sure what happened, but I do know that the Arrow is the best thing to happen to this city. He saved my life that night. And I believe he's out there, right now, fighting for all of us."_

\---

Oliver leans against the wall in the hallway, out of sight. He's on one foot right now, left toe dragging uselessly on the ground. He needs two steady steps to make it into view. Right foot left foot right foot left. Two simple steps to save his sister's life. He breathes in deep. Visualizes it.

He tests the draw on his bow, pulling tension into the string to feel the weight of the weapon in his hands. He feels the phantom touch of correction on his elbow, on the small of his lower back, carefully positioning his arms and whispering how to work in unison with the fine vibrations of the human body that make the point of the arrow jump and waver even with the steadiest of draws, harnessing the minute clockwork of life into accuracy and precision.

He hears Diggle say, from the room in front of him, "You have failed this city." Oliver braces himself against the pain and walks out into the light.

\---

_"I used to hate the Arrow," Ms. Queen says. "He attacked my mom last year, you know. She had to beg for her life. But he's saved my brother's life twice now, and I suppose he's saved mine too. All I know is that that night, he was on my side."_

\---

Diggle's up in the catwalks again, while Felicity covers the back exit. She has the hood pulled low over her eyes, hiding her blonde hair and the gleam of her glasses. She's trying to stay in the shadows, so that only the point of her arrow glows in the artificially dim light of the club. Thea is wide-eyed and silent, the goon standing over her, gun pointed toward the back like the gunfight at the end of the old Westerns Oliver's dad used to watch. Oliver raises his bow and aims it at the man behind the bar. He grits his teeth and thinks about keeping his stance as even as possible.

"What do you want?" Oliver asks, keeping his voice rough and low. A minute or two. That's all they need.

The man turns to him slowly, lazily, blood seeped into the back of his shirt. "You have a little team now, I see. How nice."

Sixty seconds. " _What_. Do you _want_."

"You don't remember me?"

Oliver shakes his head, both in answer and to knock the blood around a little. He feels dangerously lightheaded now, his head a misshapen balloon. "No."

"You _killed_ him, and you don't remember?" the man says, starting to scream, and his voice breaks on the last word. The contrast between the calm is startling and horrifying.

Oliver freezes.

"My brother," the man sobs, and the point of his gun starts to shake. Thirty seconds. "Ezekiel. It was only a job. He was doing his job. You…"

Oliver tries to lick his lips, tries to give them some semblance of moisture, and tastes only death.

"I'm sorry," he says.

He shoots an arrow through the man's shoulder.

The man howls and drops the gun, grasping at the shaft protruding from his collarbone, and the second man standing watch over Thea whirls around from where he'd been covering Felicity-as-Arrow at the back exit. Diggle drops from the ceiling then, scissoring his legs around the man's neck and taking them both down in tumble of bodies. Felicity moves in closer, cautiously, using her drawn arrow as a threat that Oliver hopes she will never have to use. 

The man behind the bar falls to his knees.

The last thing Oliver hears is the distant sound of sirens.

\---

Oliver Queen wakes up.

He's in his own bed, in the home he grew up in, the hiss of air and soft thump of plumbing creating a tapestry of white noise, all the little un-quiets of a modern life. He hears a quiet humming as well, throaty and bright and cheerfully out of tune. It's a woman's voice.

He turns his head carefully. Thea is reading a magazine next to the bed, sprawled in a chair with her bare feet perched jauntily on the edge of the comforter. She's humming wordlessly, one of those kicky pop songs that has been everywhere lately, dancing her bare feet in the air with the chorus. The swelling around her blacked eye has gone down, although it's still puffy and tinged with purple and black.

"Thea?"

She drops the magazine in her lap. "Oliver! Are you okay? How are you?"

Oliver struggles up. He drags his left leg in the process, the bandages around his calf sticking to the sheets, and grimaces. "I feel like hell."

Thea slumps back in her chair. "Oh, thank God."

"Thanks," he says, and Thea rolls her eyes. The gesture is so painstakingly normal Oliver feels it as a clench in his gut.

"No, I mean, you're speaking English. I was so scared for you. I mean, _Chinese_ , Oliver? Is that an island thing or did I miss the memo on the college classes?"

"…Island," Oliver answers, cautiously. "Are you okay, Speedy? Everything still in one piece?"

She prods the swelling at the top of her cheekbone tentatively and smiles, small and wry. "Roy flipped out. Said he won't let me close alone again. But there's no lasting damage, and Roy mostly needed a chance to get it all out, you know?"

"Felicity and Dig -"

"They're both here." Thea hesitates, like she's going to say something else, but instead she asks, "Oliver, why didn't you tell us? About... the Chinese thing?"

Oliver shifts and pulls himself up to a seated position. He considers his answer. "I didn't want to explain how I learned it."

"Oh," Thea says.

"It's not that I don't trust you, or Mom. It's just… it's hard to talk about." He takes a deep breath, sucking air through his teeth. "She died. The woman who taught me Chinese. She's dead now."

Thea moves to sit down next to him on the bed, her hip pressed up against his leg, and brushes a cool hand down the side of his face. "I'm sorry," she says simply. Oliver keeps forgetting that somewhere along the way the girl he'd left behind, arms and legs like windmills and bumpy elbows that their dad would make a big production out of kissing before sending her to bed - she grew up. "What was her name?"

He hasn't said it since the island. The word feels forbidden, dangerous. Like sharing a secret.

"Shado."

"Shadow?"

"No 'w'. _Shado_."

Thea's hand is calm and gentle. "It's a pretty name."

\---

_The Arrow is still at large, and still uncaught. His legend grows by the day in Starling City._

_"I don't know who he is, and I don't really care," Mr. Queen says. "But I suppose he's a hero, and I suppose Starling City needs those right now."_

\---

Felicity rushes in at that point to hug him and stammer out something about him looking good in bed, which she immediately retracts, and then confirms again, and finally just asks about the leg. Diggle grins like the Cheshire cat and shakes Oliver's bandaged hand and tells him he's glad to see him in one piece.

Thea mumbles something about checking in with Roy, and leaves them alone. Felicity and Diggle both watch her go with matching speculative expressions.

Oliver isn't sure whether the strange feeling in his chest is relief or worry. "Does she know?"

"No," Felicity says. "But she's going to figure it out."

Oliver lets his head drop back down to the pillow.

"She's confirming our story that there was only one man there that night - the Arrow," Diggle says thoughtfully. "She hasn't asked any questions, and she hasn't given any indication that it's anything but the truth."

Oliver closes his eyes, and feels a small sort of smile drift across his face. "That's my girl."

\---

When Oliver Queen dreams, he dreams of curling up in the battered remains of a broken-down plane: the ghosts of Shado and Slade bickering in the shadows. Tommy and Laurel holding hands. Thea and his mom, conversing under their breath, while Felicity and Diggle sit together against the wall, shoulders touching. Everybody he loves, names faded like ghosts and always here, always with him, the jungle like a blanket wrapped around them, known like the back of his hand.

Oliver sleeps cold and hard, but never alone.

He sleeps.

**Author's Note:**

> If you enjoyed this story and would like to share it, please consider reblogging [this post](http://blithers.tumblr.com/post/71858737864/yuleltide-story-i-wrote-1) on tumblr!


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